The Darkest Time of Night

by Jeremy Finley

  “Listen,” came Steven’s voice. “I think I know where William is.”

  “You think he’s still alive?” I heard myself respond. Then, a pause. “Steven, please. You owe it to my father to tell me. Tell me what you know—”

  Deanna hit the pause button. “You know this is coming from that hotel in Tennessee. Obviously, we had the room bugged. You need to know that this audio—along with photographs of Steven Richards being forced out of the hotel room by FBI agents, and you and I leaving afterwards—is compiled in a file that can be sent, with the click of a button, to FOX News and The Washington Post. Can you imagine what they’d do with this after what’s already been released about you in that basement with Richards’s supporters? What it would do to your family? Because this is where we’re at now, Mrs. Roseworth. You either agree to go quietly into obscurity, or we release this. It will show you in a hotel room with your former lover. Agreeing to do anything he asks. Is this the last memory you want your family to have of you? For your husband to have of you?”

  I heard it then, a slight tapping, coming from the corners of the room. As I glanced over, Deanna snapped her fingers. “Stay with me, Mrs. Roseworth. I need to know you understand. If you will agree to vanish—with our assistance—the recording never goes anywhere. It’s also imperative that you tell me how it is you found this town. We didn’t hear the two of you discuss Argentum in the hotel room. How did Steven Richards tell you about it?”

  The tapping sounds grew louder now. They came from the corner of the room, directly behind where Deanna sat. Over her shoulder, I could see a tall pneumatic tube stretching from floor to ceiling. Something tiny was inside, popping.

  “They have a right to know,” I said softly, looking at the glass tube, then back to her. “Families all over the world spend their whole lives dying a little more every day wondering what happened to their loved ones, and you’ve had them all the time. And if anyone tries to find them and tracks them here or to any of the other bases, you have no qualms about murdering them, too.”

  “It’s not that simple, Mrs. Roseworth. Surely you must realize that. We’re in the containment business, not the killing business. Back to my earlier question. We need to know how you got here. The more open you are with us, the more we can be lenient in letting you see your grandson before…”

  “Before what? The man ordered to kill us obviously failed. My husband will soon know where I am—”

  “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your friend didn’t make it. And it’s no one’s fault but your own.”

  I paused. “I don’t believe you.”

  “A tragic accident, from what I’m told. She drove off the road, crashed the van. She wouldn’t have been driving in this horrible weather if you hadn’t directed her to leave—”

  “You’re lying.”

  She sighed, took out her phone, punched with her finger and then held it out for me to see. “One of our officers came upon her wrecked vehicle.”

  I leaned in and could see the van sunk in a snowbank. Even on the small screen, it was easy to see that the shattered back window was riddled with bullet holes.

  “My God,” I whispered.

  “No one wants any more tragic accidents involving anyone else you love.”

  “You wouldn’t hurt William—”

  “You need to start explaining how it is you came to find Argentum,” she said, having to raise her voice over the now-frantic popping sound. She turned around to the tube as the entire building shook for a moment.

  In response, the long canister began to fill up, as if some sort of film was suddenly coating the glass from the inside. The building rattled again, and Deanna had to steady herself against the wall. When the shaking stopped, she began to type briskly on the computer.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

  The door opened and a man in camouflage stuck his head in, a long-range rifle over his shoulder.

  “Ms. Ruck, you need to come. Right now.”

  “I’m debriefing—”

  The building shuddered. The wheels under my chair began to roll.

  “Right now,” the soldier insisted.

  Deanna held on to the wall. “You might have noticed, Captain, that I am not in your military, and I don’t take orders from you. And the tremors aren’t unusual. Gather them up—”

  “Ma’am, there are two ships. And they’re sending them down.”

  “They always come down.”

  “No. Not people. They’re coming down.”

  Deanna stood up. She stole one more glance at the tube and grabbed the door. “You’ll have to stay here, Mrs. Roseworth. I should be right back. Use this time to think about what we’ve talked about. You know what you need to do.”

  As she hurried out, a series of beeps came from outside and another tremor rippled through the building. I went to the door. The handle refused to even move.

  I covered my mouth with my fingertips.

  Roxy.

  My oldest friend, my constant companion for so many years, dead because she wouldn’t let me come here alone. My girls, my grandsons, Tom, all lost. The military would take Roxy’s truck and my Volvo from the Nashville airport, crash hers off some rural road in Paducah, and have mine crushed. If they had gone so far as to frame Steven for the death of William, they could certainly go to extraordinary lengths to hide the truth about what happened to us—

  No. I will not. I began to pace, keeping my hand on the wall. I will not let it all be in vain.

  The glass tube was now emitting a low humming sound. I approached it and knew why the sound was so familiar. My throat tightened in realization.

  It wasn’t humming. It was vibrating.

  Inside, thousands of ladybugs swarmed, frantically smashing against the glass and climbing on top of each other. The bottom of the tube was difficult to see, making it unclear where the bugs originated.

  There was no doubt why the medical center kept a tube like this in the room.

  The soldier said they were coming down.

  The room shuddered violently and the lights dimmed as pads of paper and clipboards slid off the shelves and slapped onto the floor. I instinctively reached out to balance the tube, but found it firmly set into the concrete. William’s room had been empty, right? I didn’t remember seeing breakable things up high, heavy things, that could have fallen on him. Was he still in the room? What if they had already taken him somewhere else—?

  The lights went out. I held tight to a table as darkness swallowed the room. I eased alongside the table, brushing up against a chair. I looked for the door, but the window in the door was nowhere to be seen, as the lights out in the hallway were also extinguished. I fumbled to where I thought the door was and slid up against the wall.

  In the pitch blackness of the room, I saw it: the blinking light of the battery of Deanna’s laptop where it had fallen to the floor. Maybe there was wifi, maybe there was a way I could send an email or something to the outside world.

  I felt through the darkness. But once I opened the laptop’s brilliant screen, my hopes were dashed. The internet signal was gray, with no bars.

  I could still use it as a light source, try to find something to break through the door. But even if I happened upon a circular saw or a sledge hammer, I realized, I still couldn’t get through the electronically locked door.

  The screen glared at me. The laptop belonged to a woman who had to be one of the top officials amongst the black suits. Maybe she had the pass codes to the doors in one of the folders.

  Each file appeared administrative: budget, addresses, PowerPoint presentations, research models. I continued to read the headers: overlays, contact points, spreadsheets, survivors’ interviews, satellite coordinates—

  I stopped scrolling down to instead use the track pad to move the arrow over to the second to the last folder in the row.

  Survivors’ interviews.

  I clicked
on it to find several internal folders. Each was marked with a code: JFAZ206, HTNY85, RJIL72, EKOK11 …

  Get back to the main screen, keeping looking for anything that could contain pass codes.

  I could barely navigate Microsoft Word on my computer, how could I possibly understand what these folders meant?

  CJCA82, TRPA72, TDIL73, KVIL73, LSTN51—

  Those letters and numbers … LSTN51 …

  I held my breath. LSTN51. LS, my initials with my maiden name. TN for Tennessee. 51. The year I was born.

  I opened up the folder. Three QuickTime movies were inside, each with their own label: subject camera, interviewer camera, and combined cameras.

  The room rumbled slightly. I clicked on the first movie. After the color wheel spun for a few seconds, a screen opened up. When the video clip proves to be nothing, I’ll go back to searching the rest of the computer.

  As the video began to play, my hand raised to my chest.

  A little girl sat in a chair in front of a table. Despite the grainy footage that was obviously taken from a filmstrip, it was easy to tell she was exhausted. Even though it was in black-and-white, even though the clip had several jumps from when the old film flickered, even though the camera was several feet away, I knew her.

  It was me, at five years old.

  “Yes,” I heard myself say softly.

  At the sound of the voice of an adult, I watched the much younger version of myself squirm at bit, looking around for the words. “I saw the people. The people I told you about. They change colors.”

  I know this. My God, I know this.

  I stopped the clip and moved the arrow directly to the “interviewer” video clip. Only after the video played for a few moments did I finally begin to breathe.

  I had first seen the man in the video on Doug’s computer in the basement of Steven’s home. I remembered Doug had clamped the laptop shut, saying he would show me the rest of the video if I promised to go public. The first known interview of an abductee, he had said.

  After I’d left, he’d followed us to the street, standing outside my window. “You’ll never know. You’ll never know the truth—”

  I didn’t need to go to the end of the clip to see what it would reveal. But I did anyway, fast-forwarding to the end, as the man took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead.

  The camera panned for a moment from the man to where my five-year-old self sat at the other end of the table.

  Though the camera was on me, I heard the man whisper, his mic still picking up his words. “I’m not getting anything here. Get the Propofol ready.” The film stopped rolling.

  My breath caught in my throat. Every card-carrying member of AARP knew that Propofol is used before major surgeries, but can also cause memory loss. My God—

  I doubled clicked on the video labeled “combined cameras.” It began as the second video had—with the man in the horn-rimmed glasses and the fierce part in his hair.

  “Are you comfortable?” the man asked.

  The video then cut to show five-year-old me sitting at the table, looking out the window beside me. “Yes,” I said, squinting in the sunlight streaming through. When the camera adjusted to the lens flare from the sun, I could see endless waves of water stretching out from a long beach.

  The edited video featuring both cameras continued with the man leaning forward. “Can you tell me about what you saw?”

  “I saw the people. The people I told you about. The people in the sky change colors,” I heard myself reply.

  “What do you remember about the ship in the sky?”

  My little eyes looked back to him. It looked like I started trembling. “Mama and Daddy took me to St. Louis once, it was bigger than that. It changes colors too. Especially when they caused it to rain.”

  “Rain?”

  I watched myself nod. “When we came back down … everything was clear … then it got stormy. All around us. Bad clouds. Big winds. They did it. They brought the storm … when they came down.”

  The man furiously scribbled and then tapped his forehead with his pencil.

  “I know you’ve been through a lot. I need you to explain this to me. You told me before that you never actually talked to the … people in the sky. That you … understood them—like you spoke with your thoughts.”

  “We shared.”

  “You shared?”

  I nodded. “Some of mine, some of theirs.”

  “This is very, very important, Lynn. Is this how they communicated with you? Was it like a conversation?”

  “Back and forth. Back and forth. I showed them the cornfield by my house, they showed me how they fly over cornfields. But then … it was not nice. They … wanted more. Like when they wanted to see if I get sick. I showed them when I got chicken pox that one time and Mama made me take a bath in all that white stuff. And then … I saw how they want to make other people get sick, and eat food that’s bad, and get hurt. In all kinds of ways.”

  “How are they going to hurt people?”

  I watched as my younger self reached up behind my head and winced. “There’s something … in me. And in the other people they bring back. They want to see … if everyone around us … gets hurt by what this does. I don’t want it in my head—”

  “Get hurt by what?”

  “What’s in here,” I saw myself motion to the base of my skull. “Can I see my mama and daddy now?”

  “That’s all for now. Thank you, Lynn. I know it’s been difficult. You’re a strong, special girl—”

  I stopped the video with a sharp tap.

  Special ones, Verna had said. They don’t know why for sure. But unlike the adults, a few of the kids actually remember. I’ve heard the docs whisper—‘cause they don’t think I can hear—that it’s a genetic thing that their memories are stronger than whatever those bastards in the cosmos do to them. And if those kids come back, well, the Suits have all kinds of good drugs to make those memories, and everything else, go away—

  No, no, no, I thought, exiting out of the folder and frantically scanning the others. A genetic thing …

  The government gave me drugs—certainly the Propofol—and took everything I knew about my parents away.

  WCTN11, WCTN11, WCTN11–

  Oh, no.

  The very last folder was WCTN11.

  WC, William Chance. TN, Tennessee. 11. He was born in 2011. I clicked on it. Again, three movies. I frantically opened the third.

  The video was incredibly clear, obviously recorded in high definition, and this time it was a younger man sitting in a stark white room. He adjusted his black tie and smiled with the warmth of an ice rink.

  “Hello, William. Are you OK?”

  My grandson sat in a chair, his short legs dangling. “I want to see my mommy and daddy.”

  I blinked back angry tears. He remembered us.

  “You will, son, but I need to ask you a few questions—”

  “Want to see my mommy and daddy and my nanna.”

  “Sure you do. But I need to talk to you first. About what you saw. And what you drew for us.”

  “I already told the other man. They’re mad. I wanna go home.”

  “They’re mad?”

  “Really mad. I wanna go home. Don’t let them take me back up there.”

  “You’re safe now, William. You told my colleague Dr. Cody that the people in the stars who took you—”

  “They aren’t people. Please, can I call my mommy?”

  “Why are they mad, William?”

  “I already showed you.”

  The man opened the folder in front of him and drew out a few pieces of paper. He looked directly into the camera and indicated to the photographer to zoom in. The lens focused, and the picture came into closer view.

  “William, can you confirm that you drew these?” He slid the pictures over to William.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tell me what you’ve drawn. We know how they share memories, so you don’t have to explain that. All
we need to know is what you saw from them.”

  I heard William sigh. I leaned in closer to the screen, seeing on the top sheet several stick figures inside a building. “Those … are the people they sent back. But … you trapped them here.”

  The man pointed to another group of stick figures walking on a hill. “Then who are these other people?”

  “That’s what all the people they brought back are supposed to be doing. Moving around. Not stuck here and in the other places you keep them.”

  “You mean everyone … with the bump like yours?”

  William nodded. “Will it go away? It hurts.”

  “In time, it goes away. Back to the people who are supposed to be walking around, why do you have those lines around their heads?”

  As the camera zoomed in closer, I saw what appeared to be waves coming from the heads of the figures. “That’s what some of us are supposed to be doing.”

  “Some of you? But not all of you? Why?”

  “Because … they haven’t flipped the switch on everybody yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  William waited a moment and then took the man’s pen from where it lay and added waves around all the heads. “They’re almost ready for everyone to start together. But they had to be spread out. So they went to see where everybody was, and found out … that you stopped them.”

  “Stopped them from what?”

  William reached over and touched the bottom of the picture, where a few stick figures lay on the ground, their eyes marked with Xs instead of dots.

  “William, listen to me. I know this is hard to understand. Do the people in the stars know why we’re containing the people they’ve returned—in hospitals?”

  “Do I get to leave the hospital? I wanna go home.”

  “Of course.”

  “The monsters showed me how you trapped the people here and in all the other places like this. But the people they send back are not supposed to be trapped—they’re supposed to go everywhere and cause trouble, with what the monsters put in here,” William said, gently touching the back of his head and then reaching out for the rest of his drawings.

  The camera moved in, showing more of William’s stick figures. People emitting the waves were standing under dark clouds from which tornadoes were descending.